Editing Marxism–Leninism (section)

=== Stalin's rise to power (1922–1928) ===
{{Main|Joseph Stalin's rise to power}}
[[File:Vladimir Lenin on the front page of Projector (Spotlight) issue 15 dated 15 Sep 1923.jpg|thumb|left|At his death on 21 January 1924, Lenin's [[Lenin's Testament|political testament]] ordered the removal of Stalin as [[General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|General Secretary]] because of his abusive personality.]]
As he neared death after suffering strokes, [[Lenin's Testament]] of December 1922 named Trotsky and Stalin as the most able men in the Central Committee, but he harshly criticised them. Lenin said that Stalin should be removed from being the [[General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|General Secretary]] of the party and that he be replaced with "some other person who is superior to Stalin only in one respect, namely, in being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades."{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=41}} Upon [[Death of Vladimir Lenin|his death]] on 21 January 1924, Lenin's political testament was read aloud to the Central Committee,{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=41}} who chose to ignore Lenin's ordered removal of Stalin as General Secretary because enough members believed Stalin had been politically rehabilitated in 1923.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=41–42}}

Consequent to personally spiteful disputes about the praxis of [[Leninism]], the October Revolution veterans [[Lev Kamenev]] and [[Grigory Zinoviev]] said that the true threat to the ideological integrity of the party was Trotsky, who was a personally charismatic political leader as well as the commanding officer of the [[Red Army]] in the [[Russian Civil War]] and revolutionary partner of Lenin.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=41–42}} To thwart Trotsky's likely election to head the party, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev formed a [[Triumvirate|troika]] that featured Stalin as General Secretary, the ''de facto'' [[Power (social and political)|centre of power]] in the party and the country.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} The direction of the party was decided in confrontations of politics and personality between Stalin's troika and Trotsky over which Marxist policy to pursue, either Trotsky's policy of [[permanent revolution]] or Stalin's policy of [[socialism in one country]].{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} Trotsky's permanent revolution advocated rapid industrialisation, elimination of private farming and having the Soviet Union promote the spread of communist revolution abroad.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=43}} Stalin's socialism in one country stressed moderation and development of positive relations between the Soviet Union and other countries to increase trade and foreign investment.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} To politically isolate and oust Trotsky from the party, Stalin expediently advocated socialism in one country, a policy to which he was indifferent.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} In 1925, the [[14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)]] chose Stalin's policy, defeating Trotsky as a possible leader of the party and of the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}}

In the 1925–1927 period, Stalin dissolved the troika and disowned the [[Centrist Marxism|centrist]] Kamenev and Zinoviev for an expedient alliance with the three most prominent leaders of the so-called [[Right Opposition]], namely [[Alexei Rykov]] ([[Premier of Russia]], 1924–1929; [[Premier of the Soviet Union]], 1924–1930),<ref name=Rykov>{{cite web|url=http://www.archontology.org/nations/rus/rus_govt1/rykov.php |title=Aleksey Ivanovich Rykov |publisher=Archontology |access-date=1 March 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612142905/http://www.archontology.org/nations/rus/rus_govt1/rykov.php |archive-date=12 June 2018 |url-status=live |df=dmy-all}}</ref> [[Nikolai Bukharin]] ([[Executive Committee of the Communist International|General Secretary of the Comintern]], 1926–1929; Editor-in-Chief of ''[[Pravda]]'', 1918–1929), and [[Mikhail Tomsky]] (Chairman of the [[Trade unions in the Soviet Union|All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions]] in the 1920s).{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}}<ref>{{cite book |last=Wynn |first=Charters |title=From the Factory to the Kremlin: Mikhail Tomsky and the Russian Worker |publisher=[[University of Texas at Austin]], [[University of Pittsburgh]] |date=22 May 1996 |url=http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1996-809-09-Wynn.pdf |access-date=29 May 2021 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210903181631/https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1996-809-09-Wynn.pdf |archive-date=3 September 2021}}</ref> In 1927, the party endorsed Stalin's policy of socialism in one country as the Soviet Union's national policy and expelled the leftist Trotsky and the centrists Kamenev and Zinoviev from the [[Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Politburo]].{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}}<ref>{{cite book |title=The Stalin Era |last=Strong |first=Anna Louise |publisher=New York Mainstream Publishers |year=1957 |isbn=0-900988-54-1 |location=New York City}}</ref> In 1929, Stalin politically controlled the party and the Soviet Union by way of deception and administrative acumen.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} In that time, Stalin's centralised, socialism in one country régime had negatively associated Lenin's revolutionary [[Bolshevism]] with Stalinism, i.e. government by command-policy to realise projects such as the rapid industrialisation of cities and the collectivisation of agriculture.{{sfn|Bottomore|1991|p=54}} Such Stalinism also subordinated the interests (political, national and ideological) of Asian and European communist parties to the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Bottomore|1991|p=54}}

In the 1928–1932 period of the [[First five-year plan (Soviet Union)|first five-year plan]], Stalin effected the [[dekulakisation]] of the farmlands of the Soviet Union, a politically radical dispossession of the [[kulak]] class of peasant-landlords from the [[Tsarism|Tsarist]] social order of monarchy.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} As [[Old Bolshevik]] revolutionaries, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky recommended amelioration of the dekulakisation to lessen the negative social impact in the relations between the Soviet peoples and the party, but Stalin took umbrage and then accused them of uncommunist philosophical deviations from Lenin and Marx.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/books/SovietUnion/StalinEra_StrongAL.pdf |title=The Stalin Era |last=Strong |first=Anna Louise |website=Prison Censorship |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161110224747/https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/books/SovietUnion/StalinEra_StrongAL.pdf |archive-date=10 November 2016 |access-date=10 November 2016}}</ref> That implicit accusation of [[Deviationism|ideological deviationism]] licensed Stalin to accuse Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky of plotting against the party and the appearance of impropriety then compelled the resignations of the Old Bolsheviks from government and from the Politburo.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} Stalin then completed his political purging of the party by exiling Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=42}} Afterwards, the political opposition to the practical régime of Stalinism was denounced as [[Trotskyism]] (Bolshevik–Leninism), described as a deviation from Marxism–Leninism, the state ideology of the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Bottomore|1991|p=54}}

Political developments in the Soviet Union included Stalin dismantling the remaining elements of democracy from the party by extending his control over its institutions and eliminating any possible rivals.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}} The party's ranks grew in numbers, with the party modifying its organisation to include more trade unions and factories.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}} The ranks and files of the party were populated with members from the trade unions and the factories, whom Stalin controlled because there were no other Old Bolsheviks to contradict Marxism–Leninism.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}} In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union adopted the [[1936 Soviet Constitution]] which ended weighted-voting preferences for workers, promulgated [[universal suffrage]] for every man and woman older than 18 years of age and organised the soviets (councils of workers) into two legislatures, namely the [[Soviet of the Union]] (representing electoral districts) and the [[Soviet of Nationalities]] (representing the ethnic groups of the country).{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}} By 1939, with the exception of Stalin himself, none of the original Bolsheviks of the October Revolution of 1917 remained in the party.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}} Unquestioning loyalty to Stalin was expected by the regime of all citizens.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}}

Stalin exercised extensive personal control over the party and unleashed an unprecedented level of violence to eliminate any potential threat to his regime.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=47}} While Stalin exercised major control over political initiatives, their implementation was in the control of localities, often with local leaders interpreting the policies in a way that served themselves best.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=47}} This abuse of power by local leaders exacerbated the violent purges and terror campaigns carried out by Stalin against members of the party deemed to be traitors.{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=47}} With the [[Great Purge]] (1936–1938), Stalin rid himself of internal enemies in the party and rid the Soviet Union of any alleged socially dangerous and counterrevolutionary person who might have offered legitimate political opposition to Marxism–Leninism.{{sfn|Pons|Service|2010|p=447}}

Stalin allowed the secret police [[NKVD]] (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) to rise above the law and the [[State Political Directorate|GPU]] (State Political Directorate) to use [[political violence]] to eliminate any person who might be a threat, whether real, potential, or imagined. As an administrator, Stalin governed the Soviet Union by controlling the formulation of national policy, but he delegated implementation to subordinate functionaries. Such freedom of action allowed local communist functionaries much discretion to interpret the intent of orders from Moscow, but this allowed their corruption. To Stalin, the correction of such abuses of authority and economic corruption were responsibility of the NKVD. In the 1937–1938 period, the NKVD arrested 1.5 million people, purged from every stratum of Soviet society and every rank and file of the party, of which 681,692 people were killed as [[Enemy of the state|enemies of the state]].{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=47}} To provide manpower (manual, intellectual and technical) to realise the construction of socialism in one country, the NKVD established the [[Gulag]] system of [[Forced labour|forced-labour]] camps for regular criminals and political dissidents, for culturally insubordinate artists and politically incorrect intellectuals and for homosexual people and religious [[Anti-communism|anti-communists]].{{sfn|Lee|2000|p=49}}